Our iPhones, Apple Watches, MacBooks, and iPads can be swimming in notifications with pings, buzzes, and dings regularly vying for our attention, but Apple is looking to change that by giving you the information you need when you want it.
Daniel Howley for Yahoo Finance:
According to Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi, the solution lies in widgets.
Small, interactive bits of apps that live on your iPhone’s home and lock screen, Apple Watch — and now Mac — widgets, Federighi explained, put the control over devices back into users’ hands.
“Notifications, of course, can pull you out of the moment and take away, in some ways, your agency, because now it’s happening to you,” Federighi told Yahoo Finance. “Not when you want to know the information but when someone wants to push it on you. And so we saw a way to correct that.”
The company has been carefully rolling out widgets across its software lines over the last few years, first introducing them to the iPhone in 2020 with iOS 14, and adding them to the Apple Watch as Smart Stack in watchOS 10, and the Mac with macOS Sonoma.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s getting better. Smart Stack in Apple Watch is already useful. But, there’s still a long way to go.
How to use the Smart Stack on Apple Watch:
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I don’t own the Watch, but the first thing I do with any iPhone or Mac is turn off all notifications, across the board.
I’m calling bullshit on you Apple. Over the years, in your quest to add features no one asked for, you’ve added multiple steps now to accomplish the same task that use to only take one or two actions to perform.
Your solutioning the problems you’ve created.
Have to agree with you on this one, James. Yes, Apple is clearly locked into a maddening cycle of new iOS and Mac OS EVERY FRICKIN’ YEAR! Not so under the great one.
If it aint’t broke, don’t fix it! Classic timeless modus operandi and words to live by.
But in Cook’s annual upgrade circus, software teams must justify their existence to receive a paycheck. So we have to live with the yearly perfect feature removed and/or changed, break others and then after a backlash restore as before or media ochre updates.
Yes, couple examples in iMessage:
There used to be a search bar at top for many generations of iOS, NOW HIDDEN. I had to research online where it went and how to get it back. Now you have to pull down every time you want to use it — EXTRA STEP.
To add a photo there was a camera icon in the lower left. Now, you have to go through two clicks to access camera role — 2 EXTRA STEPS.
You used to be able to copy a web address, a sentence or two selectively. Now, they changed the default to copy 100% of the text 100% of the time. Workaround: Paste full text in notes, edit, copy, done — 4 EXTRA STEPS.
So the question for clueless Cook putting his team on a never ending roller coaster of software development so Apple can CLAIM IMPROVEMENTS every year is laughable. Considering removing solid time tested features and making things more complicated.
Us in the old guard of Apple in the beginning, yes, I’m an old whatever, used to poke fun at Microsoft requiring an extra step or more to accomplish the same task. Seems Cookless has caught the same disease.
BOTTOM LINE: You can’t improve on perfection — just leave it alone!!!…